Featured Domains

Home.loans is ranking high on Google

When Blake Janover bought the domain name home.loans for $500,000, people scoffed at how he believed the domain name would help him in search results. Sure, his multifamily.loans domain ranked quickly, but there’s little competition for that term.

Fast forward several months and home.loans is indeed ranking well. It shows up on the first page for me when I search for “home loans” in quotes, and #11 when I search without quotes.

That’s pretty darn good for such a competitive term.

Of course, search rankings fluctuate. Just recently vacation.rentals was on the first page of Google but it appears to have slipped to the second page.

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Comments

On my end (SoCal), it is showing page 1 with quotes and on page 2 without. It appears he is very close to page 1 without quotes. If I removed some local competition he would top page 1 (with or without quotes) above some of the majors……Congrats to him!

Unfortunately (Trust me – I am 100% honest when I say this) we literally just set up Google Analytics today. It was not due to oversight or anything else. It was simply a case of working and working and working to get the website right.

I cannot begin to tell you all of the travails we have went through over the past 3, 4 months to get this thing dialed in. 1,000s and 1,000s of listings, deletions, submissions in GitHub, Slack, YouTrack, etc.

GA was just literally at the very bottom of my priority list and virtually the furthest thing from my mind.

I will come back in 1 month – promise and share true and verifiable website traffic. I have zero to hide with https://vacation.rentals and everything to celebrate.

Obviously, we are being found as client after client continues to sign up with us. Literally today – sometime before midnight – we will be over 100 listings. That alone is reason enough for celebration.

Wow!!!! Richard aka Bulloney here from Virginia Beach….Blake and Mike, you’re both my hero’s. Blake, as you know I own over 50 mostly single word .loans domains, and what I’m hearing is music to my ears. Like you guys, I’m a domain rebel much to the chagrin the .com crowd. Good luck, and starting in August, I’ll be taking my 1,500 new gTLDs to industries like yours. I hope I can be of help….Congrats!

Andrew, I know you’re reluctant to interview me, but I can be be pretty damn charming, especially when I’m falsely accused of cyber squatting. You have my email address as does Domain Sherpa, Josh Reason, and 60 Minutes of CBS.

A page 2 ranking is not going to bring in very much traffic. All the backlinks are recent domain blog articles and press releases about the domain sale so it is going to be very hard to maintain current ranking long term.

We will have a rough idea once Semrush updates, at the moment they estimate the value of organic traffic at $173 per month. About 8 clicks per month based on the prior rank of 21.That figure will go up but I don’t think it is going to cover much of the acquisition cost.

As a point of comparison, a client of ours in the loans space invested $10 in their domain and $30K in SEO (hiring us) and added Google rankings worth $970K / year, about 3x what a #1 ranking for “home loans” would be worth.

You may be able to do even better. A nice keyword domain certainly makes everything a little easier, but getting a good ROI still depends most of all on execution of other components of SEO.

It is very good quality traffic but let’s put it in perspective, the top bidders are paying about $45 per click. The conversion rate and margins would be low. It is going to take 10,000+ visitors to pay for itself.

First and foremost, most folks are not throwing tomatoes at the ‘buyer.’ Folks are acting as sponsors from Gamblers Anonymous.

1. The .com investor is not out to quash joy. No gentleman caller is more welcome than the one who has been toiling at his gTLD long enough to now afford its .com.

2. We brokered a 7-figure dictionary .com sale, and it was at number two, not page two, for many months. It took a long time for that big-domain-sale frisson to deflate. Folks peeking in and holding a mirror over your mouth, customers taking what you’re festively giving away, and regrettably, plenty of starry-eyed noobs.

3. One sells approximately five (5) domain names out of every one thousand (1000) when one’s price point is minimum 15-25K. (Others can weigh in with their numbers.) These are ‘ancient registrations,’ not clownpenis.fart. So tally up those annual .com registration fees.

5. Sales departments are manned by sweeties, not by unappealing, pustulent Harkonnens. Because business is battle, with weapons suited for the quarry. And domain investors must have the stones to call foul when the press release uses semantics, and when a broker doesn’t make plain their self-interest. (Gene Siskel to Roger Ebert: ‘You can’t be friends with them.’)

6. The buyer of this domain name has gotten a fire in his belly from the naysaying–that’s the best news. The many SEO ‘travails’ he cites above will hopefully carry the day. Great luck in every step of their journey.

On the surface the domain is brand new, almost no backlinks and of the ones they have 81% are no follow.

It’s nice to see for the buyer this is ranked so high, I hope it stays up there but based on what semrush says I think it’s a huge outlier on virtually every SEO metric. Im not a seo expert but it would be nice to get some insights on how this ranking has happened in such a short time.

Bill makes a good point and is being nice as far as I can tell, no one in their right mind searches that combination with quotes on the regular nor do they include an unnatural dot between them, it’s complete fantasy land. Time to break the bank and bust out millions in marketing because that horse won’t run long term. End of year $500k roi on a dot name… “naturally” of course Bwahahahaha

The question is though why would Google keep ranking a site based on news of a domain sale? That isn’t the type of quality signal Google is looking for, especially once the news is old. The site is no better than the thousands of other loan sites the only difference being it sits on domain that sold for a lot.

The moral of the story folks is when there is no reason for it…. Who the heck is searching homeDOTloans or using bloody quotes? This entire thing above has me rolling on the floor laughing. Look everyone if you search my substitute for a quality domain that no one searches for in the real world unless millions are spent on ads/tv etc but ya if you search it exactly or with quotes look how high we are… BWAHAHAHAHAHA And I know the buyer is just itching to give a smart ass reply like he did with Snoopy above…. have at it smart guy, hard to say that when you spent $500k on a $5k or less name.

To start with, the only smart ass comments are coming from you and from Snoopy and a couple other gasbag know nothings. So let’s establish that first and foremost

Secondly – I have spent ZERO on marketing. Get it? ZERO

(Were you one of the clowns publicly smearing Donuts and myself over the purchase price until I published the wire transfer? An apology would have been the decent thing to do)

If you think we are wicked today, wait for a week or two from now when we actually do begin to spend real cash. IOW, everything we have achieved so far – the listings – the rankings – EVERYTHING has been achieved with ZERO paid dollars.

Next, let’s get to the next ignorant part of your statement – searching with the dot.

Well genius, no one ever said to search with the dot.

My site is ranking on 181 search terms at the moment and many of them >40 are ranking top 10.

People are finding us in dozens of ways. I have absolutely zero doubt we will be at 2500 listings by the end of the year (break even for us) After that, we will flood the market strictly targeting the travelers and nothing more. More travelers will mean more word of mouth to homeowners.

Even then you will still sit here and blow flatulence about dot com this and dot net that.

Exactly Snoopy, he still doesn’t understand when someone spends big money on a quality category targeted dot com it generates the natural traffic that will lead to revenue via sales. Where as he did exactly as you say. He obviously could not obtain homeloans.com, if he did that our tune would be different.

I have told Andrew I will come back to this in 1 year to account for the experiment and I believe Blake will as well. So far, I am absolutely relaxed in my investment and expect to see nothing but great results for many years to come.

But please, do not feed into the outright character assassinations that have been lobbed around here and other sites regarding purchase price, hidden perks and all of this other nonsense.

Both URLs were purchased above board and in good faith, nothing more.

I cannot speak for Blake but for myself, I can tell you that the traffic came at me a lot faster than I was prepared for. (Snort and guffaw all you like – it is an absolute fact) We simply were not “Internet ready” and had 100s of inquiries from people who found our site through varying methods of search. (And yes, I had another one this morning I will respond to after this post)

The “know nothing” remark had more to do with people questioning the price I paid, the fact that we would NEVER rank on Google, customers would NEVER list with us and so on. All patently and proven wrong – 100%.

The “know nothing” remark had more to do with people questioning the price I paid, the fact that we would NEVER rank on Google, customers would NEVER list with us and so on. All patently and proven wrong – 100%.

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Many people still question the price, particularly the one that was $300 higher than the other as the price seemed staged to get more publicity.

Please point out who said it would never rank and people would never list with you? I don’t recall anyone saying that.

I’m too new and too old to understand all this, but it certainly will help me to market names like; Elder.Loans, Balloon.Loans, HomeEquity.Loans, Recourse.Loans and TaxRefund.Loans to name a few. This is fodder for when I take my domains to the likes of the Mortgage Bankers Association and other lending institutions. Life doesn’t get much better than being in on the ground floor of a new and innovative business model. Thanks Blake.

Talking about LMAO…why do you even care? I know exactly where you’re coming from. Do you know anything about the average mortgage loan? I can promise you, it aint your average cup of coffee. Seriously, would you like to hazard a guess how many jumbo mortgages it takes to justify a 500K domain? I didn’t think so…thus I LMAO!

I spent this much on a .com and our company ranked on page #1 for a number of months on a competitive term (granted not as high of CPC as vacation rentals or home loans but competitive). Let’s see how long the G-love lasts.

We had problems with bounce rates from an unforeseen problem with people looking for another site. . . .really horrible experience and the love was lost quickly.

I suspect the love will die off soon. I suggest the owners do everything in their power to make sure their bounce rate is minimal and that the number of pages their visitors hit is high. I think that’ll kill your ranking.

On another note, I checked the site on mobile and it wasn’t so hot in terms of usability. I suspect your mobile bounce rate will be high and you’ll lose ranking because of that quickly. Vacation rentals , same thing for your site. Make sure you’re optimizing or your new love from google will be killed quickly.

Searching with or without quotes on many terms are close in comparison. The terms discussed here are actually very close, with a slide edge to without quotes. Using quotes when searching Google is very well known and should always be a consideration when developing.

Any busines model based upon free traffic from Google is very weak long term. Regardless of the TLD. Same was true with free traffic from Yahoo back in 2000. $500K SEO capital outlay is most likely going to end up looking very foolish. Now if you had the $45/click to back up SEO with long term PPC… but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Also, you don’t have a proprietary product. You are a middleman. The amount of traffic lost to homeloans.com will make paid search almost impossible because you don’t have the margins to compete. But if you owned homeloans.com as well… but you don’t.

You’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. Timing is critical. And time is probably not on your side. You are a good SEO though.

Think about partnering with a bigger player if/while the iron is hot. I’ve seen too many of you guys think you are going to be the next big thing and lose everything to an algorithmic update.

Google has a pretty strong interest in new gTLD’s, not sure if that plays a role or not. It may. In general, new gTLD’s have ranked well in Google for sometime, many extensions. In Google’s eye, the better they rank, the more people use them, the more money they make.

Home.Loanshttps://www.home.loans/
Home loan, mortgage refinance, and home equity solutions in one place. Mortgage solutions simplified.

Curious…do you know a domainer from DownUnder who’s moniker on NamePros is “Kate”. Aussies seem to hate and feel threatened by the new gTLD’s. Why do you suppose that is? Inquiring minds would like to know.

What can I say, I don’t regard it as a burden being right so often, in this case about how great this domain is while being no “threat” to .com. 😉 And Andrew Rosener was right about this domain too, so I may be considered in good company.

When I searched for “Home Loans”, Home.Loans appeared on page 2 (middle), which is pretty good –
The algorithm weighs relevant content (which Home.Loans has)
Also Google weighs prior search history per loans, home, etc — depending on the browser – so my search results would be different.
For those who have made multiple searches of home loans and clicked on Home.Loans,(the site), Home.Loans will appear higher
Bottom line: I prefer .com, but I also root for the entrepreneurs, so I wish Michael and his team well with Home.Loans — I’m sure you and your team will do very well!,

Got home.loans on position 115 and newcastle.loans on position 72 for home loans without quotes on US Google desktop version today.
If you want to check organic results on different Google versions without a proxy you can use Google Geo Switcher:http://g.com.pub/

“To start with, the only smart ass comments are coming from you and from Snoopy and a couple other gasbag know nothings. So let’s establish that first and foremost

Secondly – I have spent ZERO on marketing. Get it? ZERO”

Mr. Michael Kugler- You just lost my respect with your unprofessional name calling comment!

1. $500,000USD spent on a domain = marketing!

2. It blows my mind how you are putting this much effort and energy into defending your acquisition instead of putting your effort and energy into running your business and proving your point! If you are that much worried about what others think then you have already failed in business.

Michael…it hasn’t taken me long to learn just how F/U the domain industry really is. Arrogance and and “know it all” attitudes plague the industry. I’ve owned businesses and worked in a multitude of industries to include the financial services industry, the healthcare industry, the sports and entertainment industries, and I can honestly say the domain industry is seriously screwed up. I’ve been advised to chill, and try to get along, but that isn’t happening:). Like I’ve told you and Blake, anything I can do to help either of you, I’m here for you. Enjoy your summer, and maybe I can get to Branson someday for a visit. Good Luck and Cheers!